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This Weekend, I Am A Home Owner
Oct. 2nd, 2016 10:36 pmOn Thursday night, our bathroom door suddenly broke. It had one of the most jury-rigged knobs in the house, with a lever on the inside and a regular knob on the outside. And the lever had always been kind of loose, requiring quite a bit of movement before it caught. But on Thursday night it wouldn't turn any more if you pushed down, only if you pushed up.
It was actually quite a trick figuring out how to get the knobs off. I'd about given up, but then I brought K. in and when I did the same 'ole jiggling and pushing of the hidden latch, she just popped it off. We agreed that I'd clearly loosened it.
So the knob was easy enough to change at that point. I did that on Friday, but the problem was that it wouldn't latch correctly into he old strike plate. So I needed to install a new strike plate less than an inch away from the old one. Which was troublesome because of the screw holes.
Youtube to the rescue! Home repairers told me how to fill the old hole with toothpicks and wood glue, which I did Saturday night. It was literally the coolest home repair that I'd ever (successfully) done myself, really making me feel like a home owner.
Then after that all dried, I was able to put in the new strike plate today. Presto! It all works fine again and is a much better knob too.
(However, I just used an unused knob that was in the garage; I really need to change it out for one with a lock, but hopefully that will be super easy at this point.)
Today there was a big task on my TODO list: clearing the acacias with the neighbors.
Acacias suck. They're high allergen trees with hugely invasive root systems that grow like weeds. They've been a plague on our household for years, constantly cropping up. Sometime after our former neighbors left, a whole crop of them appeared along on our fence line, in the neighbor's yard, and four or five years on, they were attacking our fence, reaching over the fence to attack our windows, and probably sending invasive roots at our foundation.
So several months ago K. sent a very nice letter to our new neighbors asking if we could do something about them, and offering any help necessary.
Fortunately, our neighbors are quite nice, it turns out. There were some concerns about using poisons to try and more permanently deal with the acacias, but we finally agreed to deal with them at the start of fall, when the poisons were supposed to be more effective.
And then our neighborly wife had some time off last week and she took out quite a few of the smaller (I think) acacias, making it all look super manageable. Then the neighborly husband and I went out today to deal with the remaining four and to chop them up and cover everything up so that their kids wouldn't get into the poison.
We spent about three and a half hours, and it was actually quite nice, comradely work. The trees went down pretty easy between a small little battery powered sawer they had and a big bow saw I'd gotten. Then we stripped them and cut them up and filled a green bin.
(There are still a bunch of tree bits in their yard.)
Applying the poison and covering everything afterward turned out to be quite a bit of work just because there were so many of them.
But we got it done, and I again I felt like a home owner. One who even worked with neighbors!
A few hours later I felt like I'd been beat up, and I suspect I'm going to be sore as heck tomorrow, but it was still good work.
(And I got a good hike up to Inspiration Point yesterday, so it wasn't all work this weekend.)
Still one little bit of acacia-related trouble to deal with: I'm aware of two stumps on our side that I've cut back at various times. I need to cut one of the two back and them apply poison to both of those — but I decided it was a problem for another day. I've got it on my schedule for next Sunday.
It was actually quite a trick figuring out how to get the knobs off. I'd about given up, but then I brought K. in and when I did the same 'ole jiggling and pushing of the hidden latch, she just popped it off. We agreed that I'd clearly loosened it.
So the knob was easy enough to change at that point. I did that on Friday, but the problem was that it wouldn't latch correctly into he old strike plate. So I needed to install a new strike plate less than an inch away from the old one. Which was troublesome because of the screw holes.
Youtube to the rescue! Home repairers told me how to fill the old hole with toothpicks and wood glue, which I did Saturday night. It was literally the coolest home repair that I'd ever (successfully) done myself, really making me feel like a home owner.
Then after that all dried, I was able to put in the new strike plate today. Presto! It all works fine again and is a much better knob too.
(However, I just used an unused knob that was in the garage; I really need to change it out for one with a lock, but hopefully that will be super easy at this point.)
Today there was a big task on my TODO list: clearing the acacias with the neighbors.
Acacias suck. They're high allergen trees with hugely invasive root systems that grow like weeds. They've been a plague on our household for years, constantly cropping up. Sometime after our former neighbors left, a whole crop of them appeared along on our fence line, in the neighbor's yard, and four or five years on, they were attacking our fence, reaching over the fence to attack our windows, and probably sending invasive roots at our foundation.
So several months ago K. sent a very nice letter to our new neighbors asking if we could do something about them, and offering any help necessary.
Fortunately, our neighbors are quite nice, it turns out. There were some concerns about using poisons to try and more permanently deal with the acacias, but we finally agreed to deal with them at the start of fall, when the poisons were supposed to be more effective.
And then our neighborly wife had some time off last week and she took out quite a few of the smaller (I think) acacias, making it all look super manageable. Then the neighborly husband and I went out today to deal with the remaining four and to chop them up and cover everything up so that their kids wouldn't get into the poison.
We spent about three and a half hours, and it was actually quite nice, comradely work. The trees went down pretty easy between a small little battery powered sawer they had and a big bow saw I'd gotten. Then we stripped them and cut them up and filled a green bin.
(There are still a bunch of tree bits in their yard.)
Applying the poison and covering everything afterward turned out to be quite a bit of work just because there were so many of them.
But we got it done, and I again I felt like a home owner. One who even worked with neighbors!
A few hours later I felt like I'd been beat up, and I suspect I'm going to be sore as heck tomorrow, but it was still good work.
(And I got a good hike up to Inspiration Point yesterday, so it wasn't all work this weekend.)
Still one little bit of acacia-related trouble to deal with: I'm aware of two stumps on our side that I've cut back at various times. I need to cut one of the two back and them apply poison to both of those — but I decided it was a problem for another day. I've got it on my schedule for next Sunday.